Trump Administration Carried Out 980,000 Deportations In First 18 Months: Think Tank

Authored by Chris Summers via The Epoch Times,

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) conducted 980,000 deportations during the first 18 months of President Donald Trump’s second administration, a report published by the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) think tank said on Thursday.

Trump has repeatedly said that deporting people who should not be in the United States is key to improving national security.

MPI’s report, which it said was drawn from publicly available data, was authored by Marc Rosenblum, a former head of the DHS Office of Homeland Security Statistics, and covers Jan. 20, 2025, to July 31, 2026.

Rosenblum said 20 percent of all deportations in the period involved individuals with a criminal conviction.

The report also said that, on an annual basis, total deportations are up from the administration of former President Joe Biden and from Trump’s first term.

Deportations From Interior Rising

The report also found that while two-thirds of deportations involved those who were initially intercepted at the border, there was also a rising number of actions resulting from arrests in the interior.

“The number of deportations of immigrants arrested in the country’s interior has also increased, from 8,000 per month on average in the first three months of the administration to 19,000 per month on average between May and July 2026,” the report said.

In the past year, raids by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers in many cities have been met with community resistance.

Critics of the second Trump administration’s approach have claimed that DHS and ICE are ignoring due process and the right to free speech, and have also claimed there is evidence of racial profiling.

The Trump administration has faced numerous legal challenges over deportations, but the vast majority have gone ahead without challenge.

On Tuesday, the State Department said the Trump administration had revoked more than 300,000 U.S. visas during its second term, due to criminal activity, fraud, or threats to national security.

Among those were a handful of people who were involved in demonstrating against Israel’s actions in Gaza, or making social media comments about the assassination of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk.

“President Donald Trump made immigration enforcement a centerpiece of his re-election campaign, including a promise to focus on ‘the worst of the worst,’” Rosenblum said in the report.

“Since taking office in January 2025, the administration has devoted unprecedented resources to the issue, securing $240 billion from Congress for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) through fiscal year (FY) 2029.”

The report said that despite encounters at the Mexican border being at a historically low level, 69 percent of deportations were of people stopped at the border.

The other 31 percent of deportations were of immigrants arrested in the interior, some of whom may have been residents of U.S. communities for years.

The Epoch Times reached out to DHS for comment but did not receive a response by publication time.

Reuters contributed to this report.